In the ashes of a riot

Last night, Tottenham was ablaze. Today, the media is as officialdom closes ranks to pin blame on a “criminal minority” and ignore the class anger boiling over acrossBritain. Already, with the dust barely settled, a narrative built on convenience rather than fact is being billed as truth. It is vital that this is challenged, and people remember what actually happened last night.

To begin with, I’m not going to get into the whole business of condemnation and blame. A riot is not a tactic, carefully thought out and influenced by political debate, but a phenomenon. No amount of carefully-worded calls for calm or “I understand the anger but…” weasel words will stop a similar situation from arising again. It is an explosion of anger, fear, frustration, helplessness, into destruction. To stand back and argue that it was the wrong approach is to step out-of-touch from events as the unfold in the real world. It happened, and in all likelihood it will happen again.

As to why, we know that the immediate catalyst was the shooting of Mark Duggan by police on Thursday night. Following from the news of his death, a number of people – reports vary from 120 to around 500 – gathered outside the local police station. They were demanding answers, asking for someone to come out and speak to them.

The Daily Mail reports that the catalyst for the trouble was a 16-year-old girl throwing something at police. They retaliated by attacking her with shields and batons. The crowd surged forward in anger as a result of this, and the ensuing clashes had soon enough become the full-scale riot that we all saw on television. Far from the police narrative of the vigil being “hijacked by mindless thugs,” it seems quite clear that the police had at least as much of a hand in starting the riot as anyone and that simmering class conflict did the rest.

But it would be simplistic to presume that the whole thing hangs on one death at the hands of police and one stone thrown by an angry youth.

Tottenham forms the core of the borough of Haringey, where a fast-rising total of well over 10,000 people are claiming jobseeker’s allowance. In Tottenham itself, recent government figures showed there were 54 people chasing each registered employment vacancy. It would be wrong and unfair to damn the place as a slough of blight and turpitude, but the long, main Tottenham High Road provides few obvious outward signs of prosperity.

Despite a small fall in reported crime in the year to June 2011 compared with the previous 12 months, Haringey saw an increase in burglaries and an alarming rise in robberies against the person – up from 884 offences to 1,204.

In such a climate, an event such as the shooting dead by police of 29 year-old father of four Mark Duggan on Thursday night is more likely to provide in some minds, especially young ones, a pretext, a rationale or an opportunity to jettison any respect for the law or regard for fellow citizens and let rip.

Of course, the liberal perspective on this says that such a “rationale” is wrong-headed. The police need only to “show that justice is being done” in order to restore calm. People “think they are overpoliced as criminals and underpoliced as victims,” and if we can show this as wrong then they will stick to “peaceful protest” as the outlet for their frustrations.

But the fact is that more and more people are having their illusions in social democracy shattered. On the sharp end of capitalism, they can see its reality. In ALARM’s words, “an economically bankrupt society, people being pushed out of their homes by gentrification, the NHS is being privatised, schools failing our children. Transport, food, shelter, electricity all utterly unaffordable. All of this is held in place by the murderous force of the Metropolitan police.”

This reality compounds a sense of alienation, frustration, and powerlessness. Politicians say what they need to when elections are coming, but none of them speak for working class and no matter how your vote is cast nothing ever changes. The left talk of fighting the cuts, but with an obsessive, insular focus on public sector unions and tactics such as A to B marches that continue to achieve nothing they have little relevance to those at the sharp end of austerity. Or of capitalism in general. This leaves a vacuum, within which the only options are despondency or violence – and it’s the mark of someone who’ll never have to face that choice to condemn someone for choosing the latter.

On the other side of the law, much lesser crimes by Charlie Gilmour, Francis Fernie et al have fallen foul of politically motivated sentencing. Even anti-fascist action warrants jail time. Not to mention that youths hanging out on the streets and football fans can tell you of police heavy-handedness just as readily as protesters. Ultimately, there is no shortage of resentment for the police, and once you learn what their true role within society is, it is hard to un-learn it.

Not that any of this will seep its way into the mainstream narrative, of course. There will be some acknowledgement of the underlying causes from more liberal commentators, but only in the name of understanding condemnation and an offer of social democratic illusions to placate the seething masses. Conservatives will go beyond the bounds of the absurd, accusing everyone who acknowledges anything beyond evil as a cause of masking up and joining in themselves. Stories of how “Twitter fuelled the riots” will continue to circulate, and the distinction of “peaceful citizens” and “criminal minority” will persist.

But this will not alter reality. It will not stem the rising tide of resentment and alienation across the working class. It will not stop the next riot from erupting when the right spark is created. When that happens, there will be a simple choice. Either we take the side of a working class in revolt or we take the side of the state.

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3 Responses

Terri Marquez11/08/2011 at 12:09 ·

You may have seen David Cameron on the news today, anointing himself head of the “New Moral Army”, promising a “fightback” against rioters, and praising (at 0.53) “the million people on Facebook who’ve signed up to support the police”. The group in question was created, and is run, by this lovely chap:

On Gove’s article ‘guidance on moral relativity’ Jon Bloomfield wrote: ‘This is the politician who claimed £7,000 of posh furniture on his parliamentary expenses, including a Chinon armchair and a Manchu cabinet. When caught out, Mr Gove simply repaid the money and continued untroubled with his career. Will it be OK in court for a looter to offer to hand back a stolen TV or a pair of trainers?’

A student has today been jailed for six months for looting a £3.50 case of water from Lidl in Brixton, which seems to support the analysis provided by the Guardian datablog that magistrates appear to be taking a hard line with those convicted of riot-related offences.

Nicholas Robinson, 23, was walking back from his girlfriend’s house in Brixton in the early hours of Monday morning when he saw the store on Acre Lane being looted.

Camberwell magistrates court heard the electrical engineering student took the opportunity to go in and help himself to a case of water because he was “thirsty”.

But when the police came in, at around 2.40am, he discarded the bottles and attempted to flee the scene. He was caught and arrested by officers at the scene.

PA reports that there were gasps from the public gallery as district judge Alan Baldwin handed down the maximum penalty he could to Robinson, who has no previous convictions, for his part in the “chaos”.

The judge said: “The burglary of commercial premises in circumstances such as this, where substantial and serious public disorder is or has taken place is commonly known as looting.”

Robinson, of Borough, south London, had pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a charge of burglary.

He claimed it was an “opportunistic” crime, and he only went in when he saw the store unsecure and wanted a drink.

Robinson will have to spend three months in prison before being released on licence.